Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Cookies and Airlocks—The Perils and Virtues of Voice Commands

A six-year-old girl in Texas was delighted when the family
received an Echo Dot for a holiday gift. It features Alexa, the digital assistant
that answers questions and handles calendars, etc. The girl asked Alexa
questions about cookies and a dollhouse.

The next thing you know, Amazon delivered four pounds of
cookies and a $170 dollhouse. Alexa had interpreted the conversation as an
order.

All this goes to show the danger of voice commands. It also
serves as a segue to an excerpt from my latest science fiction manuscript, Alpha Shift.

photo by Constantin Barbu

“Emergency shutdown of docking.” Akajima spoke slowly and
clearly into the arm of his chair. The ship’s systems were mostly not operated
by voice commands, since past experience had shown that an officer lecturing
his crew on how to fire weapons could have disastrous results.

But officers could still speak certain emergency measures
into life.

A watch stander jerked his head at a monitor. “Shutdown
confirmed.”

Akajima knew that in that distant part of the ship a sheet
of metal as thick as the hull had rammed down at great speed in front of the
airlock, sealing off the ship from its connection with the shuttle. It didn’t
matter if the armor detected by the scan was armored crewmen coming out of the
cylinder into the main part of the shuttle in order to board the Panama, or an armored crawler meant to
speed its way through the passageways. They were denied.

His next words were addressed to the appropriate crew around
him. “Action Stations Yellow. All off-duty personnel confined to their berthing
compartments.”

Flashing amber lights and a shrill alarm assaulted the
senses—not just any alarm, but discordant high notes mixed with simulated baby
screams that threatened to crack the brain case of all who heard. Some off-duty
crew had been known to sleep through fistfights in their berthing compartments,
but this combination of nightmare sounds would jolt them off the bunks.